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It was a busy weekend- cleaning the house, doing the laundry, making dinners and using social media to get the files to bring unique professional development to our library from Laura Fleming, pioneering librarian author of Worlds of Making: Best Practices for Establishing a Makerspace in Your School. I learned all about Laura’s library from her principal, Eric Sheninger, at our regional CNY SLS Conference last week.

Since I heard her story, I have taken baby steps to begin planning a makerspace in our high school library. The kids want a 3-D printer. I want a more focused space in our library where the kids are learning by playing games and doing. I want them to do more, and learn more, by having fun. I’d like to improve their thinking by allowing games, experiments, coding activities, and hands-on projects to happen.

The next objective I have is to not only maintain this blog, but to advance a brand for our library on its Facebook page, and a blog for the school community. I’m hoping to get our students to brainstorm and perhaps given them ownership of our online content.

Laura and Eric also inspired my desire to try open badging professional development to train teachers about Web 2.0, websites and databases we have so they can integrate them into their curriculum. Laura GAVE me her files. I know this might be complicated, but I’m hoping with some support that I can have a platform where teachers may go and try out the cool tools I get exposed to at my conferences, the databases and websites we purchase in our district, and that it will motivate ongoing learning and further collaboration. We will see how it goes, but the only route to success is to suffer failure. I’m willing to take the risk, and I wasn’t before.

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Life can be stressful, and I am a worrier. I’m trying very hard to make myself think positive and act proactively in every situation, every day. I have to learn to hit the delete button in my head, to live in the moment, and do what I can to not get in the way of others doing the same.

I’m resolved to give our library new life once again by getting our maker lab in place, and adding a more easy social atmosphere by adding strategy board games or hands on games into our space. It all starts now, have to stay on track, and be positive.

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I’m keeping my promise to do a blog post every day, even though this Friday has been filled with tasks like filling the color printer with waste toner cartridges that can’t be found, ordering toner, and revamping a perfectly great activity because the I Pad app was erased – the app is no longer available in the store. Such is the life of the busy librarian – putting out copier fires, and also planning new activities. Fortunately, the activity planned is to teach students about manifest destiny and Westward Expansion. Being a pioneer or a Native American wasn’t easy, and so, it has reminded me that I have to keep my promises, work hard and just do.

I resolved to solve the puzzle of how to recreate the activity we lost. In doing so, I discovered many excellent documents, streaming digital video clips, as well as photographs that can retell the story of the movement of those adventurous Americans who decided to expand to the West, as well as the hardships of the Native Americans they displaced. I have decided that we will upload the clips, documents and photographs to our Schoology platform. I found these clips on our SNAP Smart Media digital catalog, provided by our BOCES School Library System. I would also like to use Socrative or a Google Doc as our assessment tool for questioning, but we will see what the teacher wants to do to make the assessment of knowledge more interactive.

For now, I am happy that I have successfully found some interesting resources to engage our students. Fingers crossed that I do not run out of any toner in the copy machine. Happy Friday, everyone!

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We learned about this very cool resource at the CNY SLS Conference where you can spell out any words using images from flickr. It is called Spell With Flickr, created by Erik Kastner, and I am hoping to use this resource with my U.S. History students as they will be creating their alphabet books online as digital books.

I plan on having students use graphic design sites (Tackk, Canva and Recite) suggested at this conference, and (s)mash or them with Flipsnack to create their own alphabet books. I’d like to catalog their books in our catalog in the library for future readers. I’m so excited that I have found a creative way for this teacher to continue to do this project with her students. Whether we are mashing or smashing these tools, I’m pretty sure they will make a splash.

I was amazed and inspired by Shannon McClintock Miller. I am going to try to make it a habit to post once a day, from now on, about my ideas and plans for curriculum and teachers. My whole goal is to stop being lazy about blogging. and show what I am DOING to promote awesome learning experiences in our school that engage our students .

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The cover of See You at Harry’s by Jo Knowles features a just-eaten hot fudge sundae glass with two spoons inside. See You at Harry’s left me feeling the simple satisfaction of just having read a perfectly sweet and intimate novel of empathy and love.

Our narrator is 12 year-old Fern, but like all children this age she is more complicated than you would think. She is named, yes, for the character in Charlotte’s Web and she lets us know who all of her siblings are also named after famous literary characters (Sara, Holden and Charlie). Her mother explains her name:

“Because Fern cares, ” she said. “From the moment you were born, I could tell you had a special soul. I knew you’d be a good friend. A hero.”

Did you feel that tug on your heartstrings? Yes, this is the special magic that is held in this novel.

One of the struggles for great readers is not being particular or intentional about what they read and also the fact that they read so much that they run out of ideas on what to read next. Another problem a great reader has is getting outside of the comfort zone of the genre he or she enjoys. I like to find out what a reader likes and try to get them to change it up just a little bit to explore something new. I thought I’d post a few of my ideas on finding good reads (where you should go if you don’t already know) and how to remix your reading habits so you don’t have to wonder about what book to read next.

One of my best tricks for making my own reading lists is perusing the best seller lists. I don’t just mean the New York Times, I…

I was reading and skimming through School Library Journal‘s May 2014 issue “The Diversity Issue” last night. I have been following the news and media regarding studies that the books that are being published really do not represent all people in our world. I started thinking about my contribution as a librarian in providing a collection to students that encompasses a global view of our world and providing a window to new cultures that our students might not engage with in our small, rural community. I decided to look at our collection and saw that I am making an effort to bring these books to our students, but I wondered how you and I could do more? I spent part of the evening browsing other blogs, articles, tweets and posts written by other school librarians to find their ideas or solutions. I also read the article in SLJ that talked about how the publishing industry thinks about diversity and I highly recommend that you read it as well as the entire issue – if you have to pick one article, click here > http://www.slj.com/2014/05/diversity/the-publishing-perspective-on-diversity-in-kid-lit/. I recommend that you browse through the entire issue as well.

Building a diverse collection has always been a part of my mission for our library and I deliberately purchase books that expand the cultural knowledge of our students and staff. These are one of my main purposes as the librarian of my building. I never want to only cater to the interests or reading preferences of my community because then they will have no windows to the real world or any experience outside of their comfort zone. Our students must know about people with a variety of backgrounds, belief systems, sexual orientations, ethnicities, etc.. This is the only way we can build empathy, compassion and open the minds of our school community. I believe every librarian and teacher has a responsibility to create a learning environment and collection that embraces diversity. A great first step for you as a librarian should be to look at the bibliographies in the latest issue of SLJ and start your shopping list.

My next step in really trying to make an effort to help our whole community (authors, publishers, students, teachers, everyone) is to actually READ the books that I purchase. I usually do read many of the books I purchase, but now I am making it a firm goal to read some of the books that I see are being recommended on diversity lists. I do a pretty good job of reading a variety of books, but I think it is a good idea to make it a goal and really work at it.

Finally, I’m going to talk about all of the great books I have read AND market them by book talking, blogging, tweeting or Face-booking. I already read a few this week and so I’m going to aim to write some short reviews and I’m going to talk them up to my students and to the teachers. I’m going to tell them if I think a book might work great as an additional text for their curriculum as well, and I’m going to tell them to read it no matter what.

I did read a book as an immediate response to this issue. I read The Thing About Luck by Cynthia Kadohata. It was listed on one of the bibliographies in SLJ and it was on my to-be-read list as it was a National Book Award winner. I should say that I’ve also just gone into the stacks to find books to read that are not necessarily award winners (but don’t negate the value of actually using these lists to help you out). The Thing About Luck follows the life of Summer, a 12 year-old Japanese-American who is traveling with her grandparents, brother and a work crew as they harvest the wheat crop in the mid-West regions of our country. My students and I will find that we share some of Summer’s experiences, but we will all learn something new because we are not that familiar with her Japanese heritage. Some of my students will relate to her experiences working with her grandparents on the harvest because we, too, live in a rural region in New York State. Some of my students live on farms, some of my students and their families are migrant workers and some of my students will also relate to her complicated relationship with her brother. Summer’s brother has some socialization issues and some of my students will feel a connection with him and his problems navigating a complicated, and sometimes, cruel world. I know that I felt a connection to Summer’s feelings about her brother and their shared worry about how he will survive when he is grown up. We also learn something new about families, Japanese culture, migrant workers, custom harvesting (actually I learned a lot about combines and harvesting -LOVED the diagrams!) and, ultimately, I learned so much about life from Summer, her family and the harvesting crew. Everything I learned really built my empathy for Summer and her family – it made me get to know them and to care about them. This is the best reason WHY we need diverse books – we need them so we learn to care about each other and who we are as people.

I know librarians do a great job of doing all of the things I suggested, so how can you help? Support your libraries, support your librarians and take action. Go to your nearest library (I suppose you could go to a bookstore as well, but don’t forget to use your library) and find a book about people you don’t really know or you do not know enough about, open it up, read it and be sure to ask for more.